Tuesday, February 06, 2007
A 'Road Home' to Lunacy
www.washington.post.com
Tuesday, February 6, 2007; A17
NEW ORLEANS -- It's beyond frustrating to hear well-meaning bureaucrats cite all the reasons that so little has been done to rebuild this ruined city and the rest of the Gulf Coast -- why, for example, out of more than 100,000 Louisiana households that have applied to the state government for their share of $7 billion in federal reconstruction funds, fewer than 400 have received their money.
That's no misprint, and I'm being generous. As of last week, when I attended a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing at the Louisiana Supreme Court building in the historic French Quarter, the actual number of homeowners who had gotten reconstruction money from this program, called Road Home, was 331. My hopeful assumption is that a few more checks have trickled out since then.
The three senators who flew down to conduct the hearing -- committee Chairman Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.), home-state champion Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and presidential hopeful Barack Obama (D-Ill.) -- were remarkably focused and patient, given the circumstances. I got so exasperated that I had to let my mind wander, and it settled on Brownian motion.
That's not a reference to Michael Brown, the ridiculous former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Brownian motion is a natural phenomenon that bewildered 19th-century physicists. Looking through their microscopes, they could see that a tiny particle suspended in a fluid -- a mote of dust, say -- didn't just float in place. It did a jittery little dance, abruptly jerking left and right and forward and back, always in motion.
It took Albert Einstein to figure out what was going on. Einstein explained that the infinitesimal molecules of the fluid, randomly zooming to and fro, are colliding with the relatively gargantuan piece of dust. If, at a given instant, more molecules hit it from the right than from the left, it moves left. The next instant, if more molecules hit it from the south than from the north, it moves north. The buffeted particle just zigzags aimlessly, never really getting anywhere.
That's where the recovery of New Orleans stands, or floats. Factors such as subparagraph-level provisions of federal programs, fine-print details of a contract signed by the state government and shifting alliances in municipal politics -- minuscule things, compared with the size of the job that must be done -- push from all sides, and the result is a frenzied stasis.
One example: Almost a year ago, Congress appropriated $10.4 billion in special housing funds for reconstruction in Louisiana. Federal bureaucrats at the hearing last week were at pains to tell the senators why the requirement that the state ante up 10 percent of that total in matching funds was being enforced, since this statutory provision was waived in other recent disasters such as the Sept. 11 attacks and several Florida hurricanes.
And no one even tried to explain why Washington won't just let Louisiana write a check for its 10 percent share, and instead wants the state to write, justify and track a separate 10 percent check for each individual rebuilding project -- thousands upon thousands of checks.
Everyone knows this is insanity. Nobody does anything about it.
Another example: Remember those lucky homeowners who have gotten their Road Home checks? The first thing they're being required to do is pay back, in full, any loans they previously received under a special Small Business Administration rebuilding program. Anything else we can do for you?
Washington complains that the state and local governments were painfully slow to develop their reconstruction plans -- and that's true. State and local officials respond that it took months to understand and comply with all the federal rules their projects must follow to qualify for funding -- and that's true, too.
Donald E. Powell, the Texas banker whom President Bush appointed to coordinate the federal post-Katrina recovery effort, was the committee hearing's opening witness. When Obama asked in plain language what the prospects were for an ordinary homeowner who wanted to rebuild and come home, Powell said thoughtfully, "That's a tough question . . . a complex question." Then he spoke about new tax incentives, which he is certain will persuade developers to build affordable housing.
Tax incentives? With most of the city still in ruins? Hello?
To escape the death dance of Brownian motion, New Orleans needs force applied in one coherent direction. I have an idea: If Gen. David H. Petraeus is as smart and tough as the president says he is, if he's good enough to save Baghdad, the president should immediately send him to New Orleans instead -- or explain why policing a civil war in Iraq takes priority over resurrecting a great American city.
Tuesday, January 09, 2007
We hear the shots
Fear and firepower
Will violent youths destroy what wind and water and fire could not?
Tuesday, January 09, 2007
by Chris Rose
I hear the shots.
During late night walks in my neighborhood, sometimes I hear the not-so-distant
reports of gunfire.
I wait for the sirens and lights to come, but they don't. In the morning, I
tear through the Metro section of this paper, looking for the news, but there
isn't any.
It's like the tree falling in the woods, I guess. If no one is killed or
injured, it didn't really happen. It's only a statistic when a victim bites the
asphalt, a piece of steel buried in his chest or leg or head.
Everyone I know hears the shots. They get muffled by the sound of fireworks
this time of year, but soon the fireworks will stop. The gunshots will not.
My neighborhood is the quietest of them all. Safe, in a relative sense. Very
relative.
Down in the 7th, the 8th and the 9th, it's part of the aural fabric of the
darkness, rat-tat-tat, the deadly game played on street corners by the Children
of the Night.
They play a game called Somebody Dies Tonight. Question is, will it be someone
you know -- a doctor, an artist, a musician -- so you'll get all up in arms
about it and march on City Hall? Or will it be another nameless, faceless child
of the streets, a killer at 17, dead himself at 18?
Should we mourn them any less?
I did not tell my wife about the shots I sometimes hear on my walks until this
weekend because I don't want to move away from New Orleans. This is neither the
time nor the place to dwell on the many reasons I don't want to go. For the
sake of argument, it's just a given.
But how close to my house do I allow the shots to come before I claim no mas?
How many more friends and acquaintances will die stupidly in their cars and
yards and doorways before I realize that I have become more afraid of and for
my city than ever before and am bordering on a siege mentality?
I've written about this before -- the pervasive predatory element of New
Orleans -- and truth to tell, I don't have anything new to contribute to the
conversation. But then again, I can't sit here at my desk and write about
anything else -- the Saints, the weather, the Road Home, trash collection,
whatever -- without thinking that it's all kind of moot when the cloud of
murder descends over the city.
Again. And again. And again. And again.
We rise up, we get mad, we yell about it at City Council meetings and preachers
decry it from the pulpits and the cops get down and dirty for a few weeks and
then . . .
And then?
Then it gets quiet, except for the gunshots at night that are trees falling in
the woods and we wait until the cycle starts again and then we get all a-tizzy
about it again and then rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat.
I've gotten several calls from national media outlets asking if I have time to
write up something about the recent crime uptick in New Orleans. What they
don't understand is that this isn't an uptick; it's simply a matter of shooters
exhibiting better aim than usual.
We are a community held hostage by our teenagers. What the hurricane couldn't
do, what the flood couldn't do, what political chicanery and incompetence could
not do, a random and soulless group of children can do.
They are children of violence, not nearly as smart or as rich as anyone else in
town but I ask you: What good is your Lexus and your Tulane MBA when your time
comes to go face to face with a child of New Orleans armed with nothing more
than a Glock and no fear of prison or death?
They say we need better schools and more cops and better drug rehab and all
that but I will tell you something that I know because I am a parent: You could
send all of these kids -- these killers -- to Newman and it wouldn't make any
difference without parents to make them care and work.
Crime is one of those elusive gremlins that statistics alone cannot address.
There can be X amount of murders and X amount of armed robberies and these make
for a numerical quantification of the problem but a wave of violent crime that
we are witnessing creates an unquantifiable effect on a community that you
can't put in a pie chart.
Dread doesn't graph well. Because it doesn't matter whether danger is real or
perceived; if people don't feel safe, it doesn't matter if numerical analysis
supports or counters their fear. We can handle wind and water and fire. But
what we've got on our hands is something that neither FEMA nor Road Home can
fix.
As I began writing this column -- on Sunday night -- my young neighbor came
over to tell me that, as she put her key in the door of her apartment, she
thought she saw a light go out inside but she was sure her roommates were not
home.
Would I come in with her, she asked me, and check it out?
The answer was yes, of course I will. This is the sort of perfunctory
neighborly chore I have performed scores of times in my life, something I
didn't even really think about because it always turned out to be nothing at
all to be concerned about.
Yet, as I walked into her apartment and drew further in, room by room, turning
on lights and looking under beds and behind closet doors, a shot of fear surged
through me: Is this the moment where I die?
Am I over-reacting? Being melodramatic? Paranoid? Crazy?
I hear the gunshots at night and I think not. If I'm crazy, it's for thinking
we can be a better community still, that we can heal from within. Some way,
somehow, don't ask me how.
I don't know. But if I am crazy, it's because I still think this is the right
place to live and work, the right place to raise my family, the right place to
face the future. But the arguments that counter this are getting stronger every
day.
. . . . . . .
Columnist Chris Rose can be reached at chris.rose@timespicayune.com, or (504)
826-3309, or (504) 352-2535.
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Tuesday, November 28, 2006
New Orleans on My Mind
Posted on Nov 28, 2006
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20061128_susan_estrich_new_orleans_on_my_mind/
I went to New Orleans last week to debate Newt Gingrich. That was the easy part. The debate also included libertarian Doug Casey, and the funny part is that however much a conservative like Newt and a liberal like me may disagree, at least we agree that for fundamental tasks like dealing with dangerous drugs, for instance, you need a government, which landed us on the same side more often than one might expect and kept the audience in positive spirits.
Which is the goal in New Orleans these days.
Everything you’ve always loved about New Orleans is still here, my driver told me on the way in from the airport, affecting the positive tone I would hear from people for the next two days, before he told me his own harrowing story of survival. About how he lived on a street where there were only two livable houses, and his house, with a still-leaking roof, was one of them. About how he lived without electricity for the first few months he was back, which was “not so bad.”
You don’t have to veer very far off the highway to see total devastation of the sort you’ve seen on the television news, but it’s stunning to see 10 minutes after you’ve passed through baggage claim at a major American airport. How did I get to a war zone in the Third World so quickly? It’s just stunning. It doesn’t look or feel like America. And there it is. Devastation. All you want. How much can you take?
You can take “recovery tours,” or someone can drive you around. You can walk around, drive around, look out your window. Water lines are everywhere. Even where everything is supposed to be all fine, there are signs that it isn’t: buildings still boarded up, notices of when something is reopening, or whether it isn’t.
Half the city hasn’t come back, so there aren’t many people around. Inside every store I go into, someone wants to help me. I walk around the French Quarter and it is early, but the bars are empty, the souvenir stores are empty, every place is empty. Everyone tells me about how the real estate agents were just there and how great that was. Good for the real estate agents.
Everyone has a story. It’s as if every person you talk to is ready for his newsmagazine interview, with one story more harrowing than the next: the woman who stayed with her invalid mother, riding out the storm for three days because there was no one to carry her mother out as the roof was blown off over their heads; the man who cajoled his aging parents, who had never left before; the people collecting animals; the children collecting toys and special mementos from houses they would never see again. Just typical stuff.
And what can you do to help?
When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping.
You tell others to come. It’s not perfect, but they’re trying. The restaurants are back. The people are amazing. They need us to go. And spend.
I live in Los Angeles. I am shopping in New Orleans.
I go to Rubinstein’s, the department store in downtown New Orleans. There are dancers in costume at the front door, offering wine to shoppers as they come in. That’s me. I am the shopper. As I come in, I am the only person in the store. I look around. Wine at 2:30 while shopping? Sure.
We have a new shoe department for ladies upstairs, they tell me.
Upstairs, two women offer to help me. Another offers me a champagne cocktail. I have nine hours of travel ahead of me—once I start.
High-heeled black suede boots.
Perfect for travel.
How much?
More than I’ve ever spent on a pair of shoes or boots in my life.
I try them on. I walk around. One more customer comes in. The sales staff tells me how much they like them. They tell me their heroic tales.
I buy the boots.
Remember New Orleans.
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
The 60-Second Interview: SANDRA WHEELER HESTER
From the massive post-Katrina "Where are they now?" file: Sandra Wheeler Hester showed up in town last week.
The political activist and cable access TV host, who earned the nickname "18-Wheeler" for her relentless assault against the status quo, came to town for the first time since evacuating last year. She took a look around, spent a few nights with her husband in Gentilly and, by the time this story appears in the paper, she says she will be long gone again.
Her vociferous presence at School Board meetings over the years guaranteed three things: 1) The meeting would not be boring; 2) At least once, she would call board member Jimmy Fahrenholtz "Jimmy Farenhonky"; and 3) She would probably end up getting kicked out of the building or arrested.
I caught up with Hester last week after her appearance in the "Politics With a Punch" political revue at Le Chat Noir.
You spent last night in a FEMA trailer?
Yes I did.
How was it?
Did you know you can sit on the toilet, have your feet soak in the tub, brush your teeth and watch the TV in the other room -- all at the same time? Very cozy. We were up there in our cardboard FEMA bed with our FEMA blanket; it was like being a young married couple. My daughter said, "Mom, if you and daddy get in a fight, you can't put him on the sofa because it's right there." I said, "Well, if that happens, I'll just put him out of my government-issue trailer. I'll evict him."
Where do you live now?
I live in a rural town on the Missouri River called Glasgow.
Why?
Good question. When I evacuated for what I thought would be two or three days, a friend there told me I was welcome there. Fourteen months later, I'm still there.
What do you do all day?
Watch corn grow.
Why aren't you back?
I worked very hard in this city trying to change the educational system and was ostracized and vilified and arrested and called everything but a child of God and quite frankly, I was just tired of it.
But don't you feel that now is that opportunity? That now could be your time?
My time is past. My role here was to shine a light on the problem. My time was to awaken people. I think they are awake now. Whether they do anything about it is up to them.
But there has never been a better time in New Orleans for hell-raisers, rabble-rousers and demagogues.
I don't think the kind of work I did fits a label of that sort. The problems here are so massive that no one individual like myself is going to be able to effect the changes that we need. We need everybody to take a stand. As long as people sit around and think somebody else has it covered -- somebody like me -- then they won't do a thing themselves.
So you're not coming back?
I don't see ever living in Louisiana again.
It's hard to imagine New Orleans without you. You're being all serious on me.
You want me to tell a joke? Part of how I was able to do the work that I was doing and survive was through humor and levity, because the situation was such a crying shame that I was laughing to keep from crying. This place was breaking my heart. Every day I prayed to God to get me out of here.
Does it bother you that a lot of people think you're crazy?
That's one of the reasons I wanted to remove myself from the situation. People started looking at me as the gadfly, as the problem. But I'm not the problem. I was part of the solution. I just had a different style and strategy. It took something radical to get people's attention.
Don't you think you were a bit of, let's say, a disruption at the School Board meetings and made a mockery of the process?
How can you make a mockery of something that's already a mockery?
Are you politically engaged in Glasgow?
No.
Do they know who you are yet?
Not yet. The editor of the little weekly newspaper there Googled me one day and kind of got a clue, but the rest of the people are totally clueless. All they know is I'm a loud, wild, woolly, fat black woman from Louisiana but they have no real idea what they have on their hands.
When will they find out?
They may never.
Why not?
Do they need to?
I just don't see you whiling away your sunset years in anonymity. I think your soul would shrivel up.
Now is a period for me to recuperate, regenerate, refocus, re- strategize and figure out a way to work smarter and not harder. I'm loving it. I sit there with cows and pigs and hogs and raccoons and possums and skunks . . .
Sounds like the old School Board meetings.
The skunk part, yeah. And the pigs.
But we need you.
You don't need me.
I'm a reporter. I need you.
See, you are wrong for that. The media was and still is one of the biggest parts of the problem. Whatever so-called journalists they have here are just about sensationalizing the problem and minimalizing the real issues. You're just about controversy, controversy, controversy.
We've seen the light.
No you haven't.
A few things have happened since you left town. Let's review some. First, your thoughts on "Chocolate City"?
That is one of the most asinine things I have ever heard. That's not a coalition-building kind of comment.
You're a specialist in education. Would you care to give the mayor a grade for his second term?
You know, when a leopard keeps changing its spots, when a chameleon keeps changing its colors, it's hard to gauge where they are going. I think his endorsing William Jefferson speaks volumes to his character.
Vince Marinello?
Oh, God! Loose on the street, an animal, because he knows the sheriff of Jefferson Parish, because he's a white male, because he's a celebrity. This man belongs in a loony bin. He is a menace and a danger to society as we speak. Do you think I would be on the street if I shot someone in the face in broad daylight in Old Metairie?
Not unless Charles Elloie was your judge.
I don't even think then.
Do you worry that by coming to New Orleans for a few days you just might get a hankering to stay?
That is unlikely. I was on a cable access TV show today, "The Ballot or the Bullet," and when the callers started calling in, I could tell my blood pressure was rising, my heart rate rising, my head started hurting . . . I didn't realize the physical effect all this has on me. It's devastating.
People around here have gotten pretty rough on those who don't stay here and fight, those who, to borrow a phrase, "cut and run."
Look, everybody has to make the best decision for their own lives. My husband has to be here because the economic reality is that he has to work. My family is broken up. My children miss him terribly. For those who have the intestinal fortitude, stay and fight, I say good for you and rise up! For those who feel it's too much for them, well -- I don't judge anybody for the decision they make and I trust no one will judge me for the choice I've made because Lord knows I gave a lot of myself to this city. I dare the first person to come up to me, after all those years I was fighting by myself, and tell me otherwise. Where were they then? I dare somebody.
. . . . . . .
Columnist Chris Rose can be reached at chris.rose@timespicayune.com; or at (504) 352-2535 or (504) 826-3309. Read past columns at www.nola.com/rose.
Monday, October 23, 2006
Hell And Back
Hell And Back
Sunday, October 22, 2006
Chris Rose
I pulled into the Shell station on Magazine Street, my car running on fumes. I turned off the motor. And then I just sat there.
There were other people pumping gas at the island I had pulled into and I didn't want them to see me, didn't want to see them, didn't want to nod hello, didn't want to interact in any fashion.
Outside the window, they looked like characters in a movie. But not my movie.
I tried to wait them out, but others would follow, get out of their cars and pump and pay and drive off, always followed by more cars, more people. How can they do this, like everything is normal, I wondered. Where do they go? What do they do?
It was early August and two minutes in my car with the windows up and the air conditioner off was insufferable. I was trapped, in my car and in my head.
So I drove off with an empty tank rather than face strangers at a gas station.
. . . . . . .
Before I continue this story, I should make a confession. For all of my adult life, when I gave it thought -- which wasn't very often -- I regarded the concepts of depression and anxiety as pretty much a load of hooey.
I never accorded any credibility to the idea that such conditions were medical in nature. Nothing scientific about it. You get sick, get fired, fall in love, get laid, buy a new pair of shoes, join a gym, get religion, seasons change -- whatever; you go with the flow, dust yourself off, get back in the game. I thought anti-depressants were for desperate housewives and fragile poets.
I no longer feel that way. Not since I fell down the rabbit hole myself and enough hands reached down to pull me out.
One of those hands belonged to a psychiatrist holding a prescription for anti-depressants. I took it. And it changed my life.
Maybe saved my life.
This is the story of one journey -- my journey -- to the edge of the post-Katrina abyss, and back again. It is a story with a happy ending -- at least so far.
. . . . . . .
I had already stopped going to the grocery store weeks before the Shell station meltdown. I had made every excuse possible to avoid going to my office because I didn't want to see anyone, didn't want to engage in small talk, hey, how's the family?
My hands shook. I had to look down when I walked down the steps, holding the banister to keep steady. I was at risk every time I got behind the wheel of a car; I couldn't pay attention.
I lost 15 pounds and it's safe to say I didn't have a lot to give. I stopped talking to Kelly, my wife. She loathed me, my silences, my distance, my inertia.
I stopped walking my dog, so she hated me, too. The grass and weeds in my yard just grew and grew.
I stopped talking to my family and my friends. I stopped answering phone calls and e-mails. I maintained limited communication with my editors to keep my job but I started missing deadlines anyway.
My editors, they were kind. They cut me slack. There's a lot of slack being cut in this town now. A lot of legroom, empathy and forgiveness.
I tried to keep an open line of communication with my kids to keep my sanity, but it was still slipping away. My two oldest, 7 and 5, began asking: "What are you looking at, Daddy?"
The thousand-yard stare. I couldn't shake it. Boring holes into the house behind my back yard. Daddy is a zombie. That was my movie: Night of the Living Dead. Followed by Morning of the Living Dead, followed by Afternoon . . .
. . . . . . .
My own darkness first became visible last fall. As the days of covering the Aftermath turned into weeks which turned into months, I began taking long walks, miles and miles, late at night, one arm pinned to my side, the other waving in stride. I became one of those guys you see coming down the street and you cross over to get out of the way.
I had crying jags and fetal positionings and other "episodes." One day last fall, while the city was still mostly abandoned, I passed out on the job, fell face first into a tree, snapped my glasses in half, gouged a hole in my forehead and lay unconscious on the side of the road for an entire afternoon.
You might think that would have been a wake-up call, but it wasn't. Instead, like everything else happening to me, I wrote a column about it, trying to make it all sound so funny.
It probably didn't help that my wife and kids spent the last four months of 2005 at my parents' home in Maryland. Until Christmas I worked, and lived, completely alone.
Even when my family finally returned, I spent the next several months driving endlessly through bombed-out neighborhoods. I met legions of people who appeared to be dying from sadness, and I wrote about them.
I was receiving thousands of e-mails in reaction to my stories in the paper, and most of them were more accounts of death, destruction and despondency by people from around south Louisiana. I am pretty sure I possess the largest archive of personal Katrina stories, little histories that would break your heart.
I guess they broke mine.
I am an audience for other people's pain. But I never considered seeking treatment. I was afraid that medication would alter my emotions to a point of insensitivity, lower my antenna to where I would no longer feel the acute grip that Katrina and the flood have on the city's psyche.
I thought, I must bleed into the pages for my art. Talk about "embedded" journalism; this was the real deal.
Worse than chronicling a region's lamentation, I thought, would be walking around like an ambassador from Happy Town telling everybody that everything is just fine, carry on, chin up, let a smile be your umbrella.
As time wore on, the toll at home worsened. I declined all dinner invitations that my wife wanted desperately to accept, something to get me out of the house, get my feet moving. I let the lawn and weeds overgrow and didn't pick up my dog's waste. I rarely shaved or even bathed. I stayed in bed as long as I could, as often as I could. What a charmer I had become.
I don't drink anymore, so the nightly self-narcolepsy that so many in this community employ was not an option. And I don't watch TV. So I developed an infinite capacity to just sit and stare. I'd noodle around on the piano, read weightless fiction and reach for my kids, always, trying to hold them, touch them, kiss them.
Tell them I was still here.
But I was disappearing fast, slogging through winter and spring and grinding to a halt by summer. I was a dead man walking.
I had never been so scared in my life.
. . . . . . .
Early this summer, with the darkness clinging to me like my own personal humidity, my stories in the newspaper moved from gray to brown to black. Readers wanted stories of hope, inspiration and triumph, something to cling to; I gave them anger and sadness and gloom. They started e-mailing me, telling me I was bringing them down when they were already down enough.
This one, Aug. 21, from a reader named Molly: "I recently became worried about you. I read your column and you seemed so sad. And not in a fakey-columnist kind of way."
This one, Aug. 19, from Debbie Koppman: "I'm a big fan. But I gotta tell ya -- I can't read your columns anymore. They are depressing. I wish you'd write about something positive."
There were scores of e-mails like this, maybe hundreds. I lost count. Most were kind -- solicitous, even; strangers invited me over for a warm meal.
But this one, on Aug. 14, from a reader named Johnny Culpepper, stuck out: "Your stories are played out Rose. Why don't you just leave the city, you're not happy, you bitch and moan all the time. Just leave or pull the trigger and get it over with."
I'm sure he didn't mean it literally -- or maybe he did, I don't know -- but truthfully, I thought it was funny. I showed it around to my wife and editors.
Three friends of mine have, in fact, killed themselves in the past year and I have wondered what that was like. I rejected it. But, for the first time, I understood why they did it.
Hopeless, helpless and unable to function. A mind shutting down and taking the body with it. A pain not physical but not of my comprehension and always there, a buzzing fluorescent light that you can't turn off.
No way out, I thought. Except there was.
. . . . . . .
I don't need to replay the early days of trauma for you here. You know what I'm talking about.
Whether you were in south Louisiana or somewhere far away, in a shelter or at your sister's house, whether you lost everything or nothing, you know what I mean.
My case might be more extreme than some because I immersed myself fully into the horror and became a full-time chronicler of sorrowful tales. I live it every day and there is no such thing as leaving it behind at the office when a whole city takes the dive.
Then again, my case is less extreme than the first responders, the doctors and nurses and EMTs, and certainly anyone who got trapped in the Dome or the Convention Center or worse -- in the water, in their attics and on their rooftops. In some cases, stuck in trees.
I've got nothing on them. How the hell do they sleep at night?
So none of this made sense. My personality has always been marked by insouciance and laughter, the seeking of adventure and new experiences. I am the class clown, the life of the party, the bon vivant.
I have always felt like I was more alert and alive than anyone in the room.
In the measure of how one made out in the storm, my life was cake. My house, my job and my family were all fine. My career was gangbusters; all manner of prestigious awards and attention. A book with great reviews and stunning sales, full auditoriums everywhere I was invited to speak, appearances on TV and radio, and the overwhelming support of readers who left gifts, flowers and cards on my doorstep, thanking me for my stories.
I had become a star of a bizarre constellation. No doubt about it, disasters are great career moves for a man in my line of work. So why the hell was I so miserable? This is the time of my life, I told myself. I am a success. I have done good things.
To no avail.
I changed the message on my phone to say: "This is Chris Rose. I am emotionally unavailable at the moment. Please leave a message."
I thought this was hilarious. Most of my friends picked it up as a classic cry for help.
My editor, my wife, my dad, my friends and just strangers on the street who recognized me from my picture in the paper had been telling me for a long time: You need to get help.
I didn't want help. I didn't want medicine. And I sure as hell didn't want to sit on a couch and tell some guy with glasses, a beard and a psych degree from Dartmouth all about my troubles.
Everybody's got troubles. I needed to stay the course, keep on writing, keep on telling the story of this city. I needed to do what I had to do, the consequences be damned, and what I had to do was dig further and further into what has happened around here -- to the people, my friends, my city, the region.
Lord, what an insufferable mess it all is.
I'm not going to get better, I thought. I'm in too deep.
. . . . . . .
In his book "Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness" -- the best literary guide to the disease that I have found -- the writer William Styron recounted his own descent into and recovery from depression, and one of the biggest obstacles, he said, was the term itself, what he calls "a true wimp of a word."
He traces the medical use of the word "depression" to a Swiss psychiatrist named Adolf Meyer, who, Styron said, "had a tin ear for the finer rhythms of English and therefore was unaware of the damage he had inflicted by offering 'depression' as a descriptive noun for such a dreadful and raging disease.
"Nonetheless, for over 75 years the word has slithered innocuously through the language like a slug, leaving little trace of its intrinsic malevolence and preventing, by its very insipidity, a general awareness of the horrible intensity of the disease when out of control."
He continued: "As one who has suffered from the malady in extremis yet returned to tell the tale, I would lobby for a truly arresting designation. 'Brainstorm,' for instance, has unfortunately been preempted to describe, somewhat jocularly, intellectual inspiration. But something along these lines is needed.
"Told that someone's mood disorder has evolved into a storm -- a veritable howling tempest in the brain, which is indeed what a clinical depression resembles like nothing else -- even the uninformed layman might display sympathy rather than the standard reaction that 'depression' evokes, something akin to 'So what?' or 'You'll pull out of it' or 'We all have bad days.' "
Styron is a helluva writer. His words were my life. I was having one serious brainstorm. Hell, it was a brain hurricane, Category 5. But what happens when your own personal despair starts bleeding over into the lives of those around you?
What happens when you can't get out of your car at the gas station even when you're out of gas? Man, talk about the perfect metaphor.
Then this summer, a colleague of mine at the newspaper took a bad mix of medications and went on a violent driving spree Uptown, an episode that ended with his pleading with the cops who surrounded him with guns drawn to shoot him.
He had gone over the cliff. And I thought to myself: If I don't do something, I'm next.
. . . . . . .
My psychiatrist asked me not to identify him in this story and I am abiding by that request.
I was referred to him by my family doctor. My first visit was Aug. 15. I told him I had doubts about his ability to make me feel better. I pled guilty to skepticism about the confessional applications of his profession and its dependency medications.
I'm no Tom Cruise; psychiatry is fine, I thought. For other people.
My very first exchange with my doctor had a morbidly comic element to it; at least, I thought so, but my sense of humor was in delicate balance to be sure.
While approaching his office, I had noticed a dead cat in his yard. Freshly dead, with flies just beginning to gather around the eyes. My initial worry was that some kid who loves this cat might see it, so I said to him: "Before we start, do you know about the cat?"
Yes, he told me. It was being taken care of. Then he paused and said: "Well, you're still noticing the environment around you. That's a good sign."
The analyst in him had already kicked in. But the patient in me was still resisting. In my lifelong habit of dampening down any serious discussion with sarcasm, I said to him: "Yeah, but what if the dead cat was the only thing I saw? What if I didn't see or hear the traffic or the trees or the birds or anything else?"
I crack myself up. I see dead things. Get it?
Yeah, neither did he.
We talked for an hour that first appointment. He told me he wanted to talk to me three or four times before he made a diagnosis and prescribed an antidote. When I came home from that first visit without a prescription, my wife was despondent and my editor enraged. To them, it was plain to see I needed something, anything, and fast.
Unbeknownst to me, my wife immediately wrote a letter to my doctor, pleading with him to put me on medication. Midway through my second session, I must have convinced him as well because he reached into a drawer and pulled out some samples of a drug called Cymbalta.
He said it could take a few weeks to kick in. Best case, he said, would be four days. He also said that its reaction time would depend on how much body fat I had; the more I had, the longer it would take. That was a good sign for me. By August, far from putting on the Katrina 15, I had become a skeletal version of my pre-K self.
And before I left that second session, he told me to change the message on my phone, that "emotionally unavailable" thing. Not funny, he said.
. . . . . . .
I began taking Cymbalta on Aug. 24, a Thursday. With practically no body fat to speak of, the drug kicked in immediately. That whole weekend, I felt like I was in the throes of a drug rush. Mildly euphoric, but also leery of what was happening inside of me. I felt off balance. But I felt better, too.
I told my wife this but she was guarded. I've always heard that everyone else notices changes in a person who takes an anti-depressant before the patient does, but that was not the case with me.
"I feel better," I told Kelly but my long-standing gloom had cast such a pall over our relationship that she took a wait-and-see attitude.
By Monday, I was settled in. The dark curtain had lifted almost entirely. The despondency and incapacitation vanished, just like that, and I was who I used to be: energetic, sarcastic, playful, affectionate and alive.
I started talking to Kelly about plans -- a word lacking from my vocabulary for months. Plans for the kids at school, extracurricular activities, weekend vacations. I had not realized until that moment that while stuck in my malaise, I had had no vision of the future whatsoever.
I wasn't planning anything. It was almost like not living.
Kelly came around to believing. We became husband and wife again. We became friends.
It all felt like a Come to Jesus experience. It felt like a miracle. But it was just medicine, plain and simple.
. . . . . . .
I asked my doctor to tell me exactly what was wrong with me so I could explain it in this story. I will be candid and tell you I still don't really understand it, the science of depression, the actions of synapses, transmitters, blockers and stimulants.
I've never been much at science. I guess I'm just a fragile poet after all.
The diagnoses and treatments for depression and anxiety are still a developing science. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders -- psychiatry's chief handbook -- practically doubles in size every time it's reprinted, filled with newer and clearer clinical trials, research and explanations.
Does that mean more people are getting depressed? Or that science is just compiling more data? I don't know.
Measuring depression is not like measuring blood sugar. You don't hit a specified danger level on a test and then you're pronounced depressed. It is nuance and interpretation and there is still a lot of guesswork involved.
But here's my doctor's take: The amount of cortisol in my brain increased to dangerous levels. The overproduction, in turn, was blocking the transmission of serotonin and norepinephrine.
Some definitions: Cortisol is the hormone produced in response to chronic stress. Serotonin and norepinephrine are neurotransmitters -- chemical messengers -- that mediate messages between nerves in the brain, and this communication system is the basic source of all mood and behavior.
The chemistry department at the University of Bristol in England has a massive Web database for serotonin, titled, appropriately: "The Molecule of Happiness."
And I wasn't getting enough. My brain was literally shorting out. The cells were not properly communicating. Chemical imbalances, likely caused by increased stress hormones -- cortisol, to be precise -- were dogging the work of my neurotransmitters, my electrical wiring. A real and true physiological deterioration had begun.
I had a disease.
This I was willing to accept. Grudgingly, for it ran against my lifelong philosophy of self-determination.
I pressed my doctor: What is the difference between sad and depressed? How do you know when you've crossed over?
"Post-traumatic stress disorder is bandied about as a common diagnosis in this community, but I think that's probably not the case," he told me. "What people are suffering from here is what I call Katrina Syndrome -- marked by sleep disturbance, recent memory impairment and increased irritability.
"Much of this is totally normal. Sadness is normal. The people around here who are bouncing around and giddy, saying that everything is all right -- they have more of a mental illness than someone who says, 'I'm pretty washed out.'
"But when you have the thousand-yard stare, when your ability to function is impaired, then you have gone from 'discomfort' to 'pathologic.' If you don't feel like you can go anywhere or do anything -- or sometimes, even move -- then you are sick."
And that was me.
And if that is you, let me offer some unsolicited advice, something that you've already been told a thousand times by people who love you, something you really ought to consider listening to this time: Get help.
. . . . . . .
I hate being dependent on a drug. Hate it more than I can say. But if the alternative is a proud stoicism in the face of sorrow accompanied by prolonged and unspeakable despair -- well, I'll take dependency.
I can live with it. I can live with anything, I guess. For now.
Cymbalta is a new generation of anti-depressant, a combination of both selective serotonin and norepinephrine re-uptake inhibitors -- SSRIs and SNRIs -- the two common drugs for anxiety and depression.
I asked my doctor why he selected it over, say, Prozac or Wellbutrin or any of the myriad anti-depressants whose brand names have become as familiar as aspirin in our community.
He replied: "It's a roll of the dice." He listened to my story, observed me and made an educated guess. If it didn't work, he said, we'd try something else.
But it worked.
Today, I can bring my kids to school in the morning and mingle effortlessly with the other parents. Crowds don't freak me out. I'm not tired all day, every day. I love going to the grocery store. I can pump gas. I notice the smell of night-blooming jasmine and I play with my kids and I clean up after my dog and the simplest things, man -- how had they ever gotten so hard?
The only effect I have noticed on my writing is that the darkness lifted. I can still channel anger, humor and irony -- the three speeds I need on my editorial stick shift.
And I'm not the only one who senses the change. Everyone tells me they can see the difference, even readers. I'm not gaunt. I make eye contact. I can talk about the weather, the Saints, whatever; it doesn't have to be so dire, every word and motion.
Strange thing is this: I never cry anymore. Ever.
I tell you truthfully that I cried every day from Aug. 29 last year until Aug. 24 this year, 360 days straight. And then I stopped. I guess the extremes of emotion have been smoothed over but, truthfully, I have shed enough tears for two lifetimes.
Even at the Saints' "Monday Night Football" game, a moment that weeks earlier would have sent me reeling into spasms of open weeping, I held it together. A lump in my throat, to be sure, but no prostration anymore.
The warning labels on anti-depressants are loaded with ominous portent, everything from nausea to sexual dysfunction and, without going into more detail than I have already poured out here, let's just say that I'm doing quite well, thank you.
It's my movie now. I am part of the flow of humanity that clogs our streets and sidewalks, taking part in and being part of the community and its growth. I have clarity and oh, what a vision it is.
But I am not cured, not by any means. Clinical trials show Cymbalta has an 80-percent success rate after six months and I'm just two months in. I felt a backwards tilt recently -- the long stare, the pacing, it crept in one weekend -- and it scared me so badly that I went to my doctor and we agreed immediately to increase the strength of my medication.
Before Katrina, I would have called somebody like me a wuss. Not to my face. But it's what I would have thought, this talk of mood swings and loss of control, all this psychobabble and hope-dope.
What a load of crap. Get a grip, I would have said.
And that's exactly what I did, through a door that was hidden from me, but that I was finally able to see.
I have a disease. Medicine saved me. I am living proof.
Emphasis on living.
. . . . . . .
Columnist Chris Rose can be reached at chris.rose@timespicayune.com, or (504) 826-3309, or (504) 352-2535.
Thursday, September 28, 2006
Saints and the Superdome
This article can be found on the web at,
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20061016/southpaw
New Orleans is a city that suffers in silence. These days, it feels like a city being strangled in slow motion, a city whose current condition makes a lie of every political platitude preached over the past year. Yet ESPN spent four hours Monday trying to make us believe that the Crescent City--through the magic of sports and the return of the New Orleans Saints--is on the verge of resurrection.
The symbol of deliverance, we were told repeatedly during the broadcast, was the $185 million renovation of the Louisiana Superdome, $94 million of which came from FEMA. Never mind that the Dome's adjoining mall and hotel are still shuttered or that the city hasn't seen that kind of money spent on low-income housing destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. The road back for the Big Easy begins in the Dome. As one ESPN talking head solemnly told us, "The most daunting task is to scrub away memories of the Superdome as a cesspool of human misery." That recalled the time when the football stadium became the homeless shelter from hell for 30,000 of New Orleans's poorest residents, huddled together in conditions Jesse Jackson likened to "the hull of a slave ship."
Now we are asked to believe the memories are being "scrubbed away." But the reality of refugee apartheid is hardly a memory. The game was held hostage to the awkward fact that the folks starring in ESPN's video montages of last year's "cesspool" were almost entirely black and the football fans in the stands were overwhelmingly white.
But recognizing this would contradict the infomercial for the new Big Easy that was designed to appeal to the typical family, which finds gumbo too spicy and thinks of soul as something consumed with tartar sauce. This message found its way into every aspect of ESPN's coverage. In the city that gave us the Marsalis family and the Neville brothers, the pregame entertainment was an incoherent duet featuring those icons of corporate rock, Green Day and U2, complete with the Irish-born Ego formally known as Bono shouting, "I am an American!" The two artists who best represent New Orleans's authentic musical tradition, Irma Thomas and Alvin Toussaint, were left to perform the national anthem, a melody so ponderous it could exorcise the soul from Aretha Franklin.
This selling of McOrleans continued when one announcer called the area outside the tourist zone "a graveyard of a community that no longer exists." But even in the most devastated parts of the city, that graveyard stubbornly throbs with life. As Josh Peter, writing from the Lower Ninth Ward for Yahoo Sports reported, "A group of 30 people gathered to watch the game next to a FEMA trailer. There were residents struggling to rebuild their homes and volunteers there to help them sharing red beans and rice. It was a congregation cheering as if it were inside the Superdome instead of inside a garage... 'We're still here,' Deborah Massey snapped at the TV announcer. 'They can't get rid of us.'"
The message behind the return of the Saints was tied together by the Godfather of No-Soul himself, former President George H.W. Bush, who declared that "the pessimists who said New Orleans wouldn't come back are wrong, and the optimists who dug in are doing great!"
Bush the Elder was then asked what he believed to be the great enduring lesson of the Katrina catastrophe. Anyone who hoped to hear "Don't hire a feckless fraternity buddy to run FEMA" was left disappointed. Instead we got: "The great lesson is the American spirit! And never give up on it! It's back and it's coming back more!"
That spirit was certainly on display when Bush walked out to the fifty-yard line for the coin flip. As Daily Kos noted, when Bush senior came out to flip the coin, ESPN apparently shut off the sound of a booing crowd for a few seconds and played audio of fake cheers. After about ten seconds, the boos were audible and angry.
There was reason for anger Monday night. There was also reason to cheer. The mood in the stadium was electric, and emotional, cathartic and wistful. I could feel Saints fans carrying their team to a 23-3 victory over the favored opponents, the Atlanta Falcons. I laughed and cheered upon seeing a big banner that read "Joe Horn for President"--both a caustic protest and a show of respect for the Saints wide receiver, who proudly says he wants to be "a voice for those who aren't heard." I felt a lump in my throat upon seeing the "Save Our Saints" sign, a reminder that for all the money spent on the Dome, Saints owner Tom Benson still threatens to move the team to more affluent shores. I shared the crowd's almost giddy love of quicksilver rookie Reggie Bush. And yes, it was nice to actually see a Bush raise up the spirit of New Orleans instead of crushing it.
It's easy to understand why ESPN announcer and Gulf Coast native Robin Roberts said, "Tonight is about baby steps forward. People are so hungry for a little slice of their normal life." It's also easy to understand why a city that depends so crucially on the tourist dollar would crave positive coverage. But the big answer for the Big Easy does not lie in becoming a gumbo-flavored Disneyland where service-economy dollars are directed to minimum-wage jobs. The city needs a massive federal works project that puts the people of New Orleans to work rebuilding their own city.
New Orleans is crying out for grand acts of daring and leadership. Nothing grand is coming from Washington, DC, and it is cruel to promote the belief that the drowned city will experience rebirth in a football stadium. The answer begins not with "scrubbing away memories of the Superdome" but in amplifying those memories so they fuel a movement to bring back not only the city but every last resident who wants to return. It ain't the Saints who need to go marching in. It's the rest of us.
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
Car 54, where are you?
Sunday, September 10, 2006
Chris Rose
I see that Car 54's schedule this weekend included a town hall-style meeting Saturday with residents of City Council District B.
And here's the kicker: The residents of District B didn't have to go to New York or L.A. or Houston to meet with Car 54. He was actually coming to them.
Here! In New Orleans!
What a refreshing notion. I guess there's nothing else going on in any other American city this weekend or Car 54 wouldn't be slumming with locals in New Orleans.
Last weekend, while in New York, Car 54 explained that there was hardly any reason for him to be back here at home because: "It's Labor Day weekend. There's not a lot going on in New Orleans."
Funny how it's interpreted, though. To you and me, "not a lot going on" generally refers to things such as garbage pickup, trailer delivery, insurance settlements, getting phone service and street repair. I think "leadership" might fit under the "not a lot going on" banner also.
To Car 54, "not a lot going on" seems to imply that there were no good national R&B acts playing in town and no large gathering of the national press corps and, hell, even Al Sharpton was going to be somewhere else that weekend, so what's the point?
So, while there was nothing going on here in New Orleans last weekend, Car 54 hosted an art opening of photographs of himself in New York City and I wish I had one of those photos because sometimes I don't remember what he looks like.
But the photos are a little outdated, because they all seem to have been taken in New Orleans.
They must be old pictures.
And while in New York, Car 54 nabbed 10 primo tickets for himself and his fleet of lemons to see sexy crooner Usher perform in a sold-out performance of "Chicago," and that's exactly what I would have done last weekend. If I could have gotten the tickets. And if I'd been in New York. And if I didn't have anything other pressing business at home.
And if I weren't mayor of New Orleans.
But there was nothing going on here, really.
And that's true for anyone who wasn't gutting their house or re-seeding their lawn or looking for a job or moving into their FEMA trailer or trying to get a FEMA trailer or filling out SBA loan forms that are more daunting than Fortune 500 corporate tax returns.
There was nothing going on if you weren't tallying gunshot victims or praying for customers to come shop at your small business or if you were struggling with child-care issues because it turns out the school where your child was supposed to start classes on Tuesday wasn't going to open because it wasn't ready.
And, supposing that none of your friends or relatives needed help with any of these problems, then, in fact, there wasn't a damn thing going on around here.
Unless, of course: There's that pesky new city ordinance, which mandates that you toil with all the life and blood you've got to get your house and yard up to the new aesthetic specifications the city demands lest it find you a blight upon the landscape, whereupon the city will gut or tear down your property with or without your permission and slap a lien on you for the expenses.
Never mind that scores of city-owned properties stretching from Hollygrove to Almonaster fail to satisfy the code. Never mind that just about every playground and school lot owned by the city has overgrowth that violates the code.
Never mind that the pothole at the corner of Tchoupitoulas and Calhoun -- a pothole! -- has been there so long and grown so deep that the shrubbery growing out of it is of the length that the new city code deems a nuisance and is in violation of the law.
Of course, someone as glib as Car 54 might dismiss this pothole as "just some hole in the ground," but to some folks, holes in the ground matter.
They matter very much.
I worry about the influence Car 54's famous new friends are having on him, all those folks from up north.
From Jesse Jackson he has learned: Blame it on somebody else.
And from George Bush he has learned: Pretend it isn't happening.
Of course, Car 54 swears his mission is to drum up business for New Orleans and I heard he did talk the coat check girl at the Usher show into coming down to Mardi Gras with some of her friends and the bell captain at his hotel is apparently genuinely interested in checking out a time share in the Quarter so maybe it's not all wasted time.
I had a crazy dream: I was driving around downtown wondering what the hell is happening to my city and wondering who would save it and I looked up and I saw a bright light.
The source of the light was the third floor of City Hall and I realized that city leaders were working there until midnight every night to hammer out the excruciating details of our recovery.
Then I drove into a pothole and woke up and realized it was all a dream. Because, in truth, there's not a lot going on in New Orleans, particularly when measured in conventional units of activity and time.
One hundred days, 200 days, 300 days, it's all the same. Time is a mere medieval contrivance -- an anachronism, really -- that leads to nothing more than unreasonable expectations.
The warranty on Car 54 says it's supposed to last four more years. But the first four years seem to have taken a toll on the old beater. Sure, it runs as smooth as ever -- a sleek and shiny ride, to be sure -- but there seem to be performance issues.
This baby is leaking gas all over the place. And I hear a lot of folks are ready for a trade-in.
. . . . . . .
Columnist Chris Rose can be reached at chris.rose@timespicayune.com; or at (504) 352-2535 or (504) 826-3309.
